Late last week we ran a story on how the Google Chrome team had decided to use Gtk+ as the graphical toolkit for the Linux version of the Chrome web browser. It was a story that caused some serious debate on a variety of aspects, but in this short editorial, I want to focus on one aspect that came forward: the longing for consistency. Several people in the thread stated they were happy with Google's choice for purely selfish reasons: they use only Gtk+ applications on their GNOME desktops. Several people chimed in to say that Qt integrates nicely in a Gtk+ environment. While that may be true from a graphical point of view, that really isn't my problem with mixing toolkits. The issue goes a lot deeper than that.

Once I was also quite interested in Gnustep & Etoile. I even learned ObjC and had some plans for a small project. But as a Desktop environment gnustep/Etoile is basically unusable: there is no webbrowser, KDE/Qt/Gnome/gtk applications do not integrate at all with gnustep. Instead of porting webkit, people want to code their own HTML rendering engine. Obviously that is o.k., because people are doing this in their spare-time and it is probably much more fun to code your own HTL rendering engine instead of porting an existing one. But as a potential gnustep user, I think it is totally wrong. There is no way to write something like webkit for such a small team as the gnustep/etoile people. Even the KDE people cannot create all the test-cases and do all the regression testing like Apple can. Instead of learning more ObjC I decided to write a small Qt/KDE application. I think Qt/KDE is quite nice from a programmer's point of view. I do not have enough experience with Objective-C/Cocoa/gnustep to judge which framework is actually better.And actually I don't care too much. I think KDE has a great community and KDE4 is moving forward quite fast and I am quite happy with it.